A few days ago, someone gifted my sister in law a pumpkin. It just sat on our kitchen counter awhile since my mother in law and I have no experience with pumpkins. I was excited to make something out of it, though. Even though I haven’t cooked anything myself, I love pumpkin pie 🙂 So I had thought about making pumpkin pie with this recipe, but wasn’t sure if the people in my house would like it 😀 So I went a safer route and baked these pumpkin cupcakes! They came out good, except I forgot to pull them out on time 😦 They didn’t burn, alhamdulillah! (Poopy diapers needed my attention, apparently).

Oh, and making the pumpkin puree was super easy! I sliced out the fat ol’ stem first and then sliced the pumpkin in half. There’s a bunch of stringy stuff and seeds inside (I know, so sad – I’d never seen the inside of a pumpkin before). Clean it out. Line a pan with foil, spray it down with cooking oil or butter and bake at 350 for an hour. Take it out of the oven, cool it and scrape the insides out. Discard the thick skin. You can stick it in a food processor, but I found it to be much less mess to just stick it in my measuring cup and puree it with a hand blender 🙂

I would’ve preferred to post a picture of the actual cupcake, but I didn’t frost them, so they’re not much to look at. I didn’t have time to make frosting and I was too lazy to go to the grocery store and pick up a can of cream cheese flavored frosting 😀